Love Island “a blueprint” for TV, says Nine.

It was rumoured to cost around $10m for filming in Spain, and while Love Island averaged around 200,000 in Overnight metro audiences on 9GO!, Nine remains upbeat that it has cracked the multi-platform model with 9Now audiences.

Nine cites the show’s cross-platform audience national average of 511,000 across television and digital (28 Day national consolidated: 265,000 + 16,000 Live VPM + 230,000 VPM).

“Love Island has redefined the traditional view of what television in Australia is,” said Hamish Turner, Nine’s Program Director. “The show broke all the rules, with an audience first approach, which saw the viewing on 9Now smash records but most importantly Love Island has provided a blueprint for what the future of television looks like.

“In early 2018 Married at First Sight set new digital records, but Love Island Australia is unlike anything we’ve seen on Australian free-to-air television to date, in that it targeted an audience of millennials and gave them the choice about when and what platform they wanted to watch it on.”

On YouTube it drew 180,000 subscribers and generated over 150m views, 85% of whom were international viewers. However, Nine maintains YouTube does not currently provide sufficient commercialisation for its content.

“When we announced Love Island Australia at our 2018 Upfronts we promised we would build a whole new franchise for the Australian market that would engage an audience of 16-39s at scale,” said Michael Stephenson, Nine’s Chief Sales Officer.

“By any measure Love Island Australia has delivered on all metrics in spades. Despite the myths around reaching millennial audiences on television Love Island Australia has proved that television – be it terrestrial TV or BVOD – is still the most powerful way of reaching them at scale in a cost-effective way.”

Nine is yet to confirm a second season but with a lively fanbase and numerous lessons learned it would be a fair bet.

They just mean that they’ve made the radical discovery that many people want to watch TV at their own leisure not on a networks scheduled time so they now have an idea about how to make a dime out of that, not that every show is now going to be a carbon copy of Love Island.